2009 Long Island Regional

[JamJam263]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Can't help but notice how prophetic the Sachem Aftershock buttons were.
Glad you guys got back on the field.
Thank you for the cool wheel/gyro medallion.

The buttons are just based off the robot's names, Ixion.(ps, the victor that caught fire controlled the gyro.)

Ixion was expelled from Olympus and blasted with a thunderbolt. Zeus ordered Hermes to bind Ixion to a winged fiery wheel that was always spinning;[7] only when Orpheus played his lyre did it stop for a while. Therefore, Ixion is bound to a burning solar wheel for all eternity, at first spinning across the heavens,[8] but in later myth transferred to Tartarus (Kerenyi 1951:160).

We can't even begin to express our gratitude to everyone there for helping us when our hopes went up in flames. To get back into the competition was the best award we could have gotten. Thank you all so much.

That gyro medallion idea came from one of our member's dad. The same guy who made the real thing, got bored at his shop one day and just stared making them to scale out of scraps. Commercial production cost of each one, ~$60-70.

[Bharat Nain]

It was quite a pleasure working with all of the field crew and drive teams because everyone was so easy going. When we were running out of time with the potential of running really late on Satuday, everyone chipped in by being efficient and by working together. I would also like to congratulate each and every team for their display of extraordinary Gracious Professionalism at all times. A special congratulations to 353 for the Chairmans award. I hope you all had fun and if you have any suggestions for next year on how to run the field better, I would like to hear.

[mtaman02]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Finally, my personal thanks to Regional Director Janet Anderson, FTA Bill Edelman, Mikey, and Bharat for making me exercise and for a really special 10th anniversary SBPLI Regional!

Hey you said you wanted to lose some weight and to make sure things were going ok for the first "few matches". So we thought 85 matches + eliminations would have sufficied .

hrm, interesting... we're all very happy that everything was corrected, tested and approved to be safe and field worthy yet again.

[Mark McLeod]

Originally Posted by XANA

No cim spinning at 5000 rpm spinning a 22lb fly wheel will last

Maybe we should talk more. I'm pretty sure I know a way to spin a flywheel all day without the CIM breaking a sweat.

[nevereverregret]

Thanks to all the teams that helped us out... (2487) and a special thanks to team 2869... Thanks guys! Cya soon

[Alex_2487]

i want to thank 870 and 102 for picking us for the elimination matches. it's too bad we lost in the semis. also i would to give thanks to Mark McLeod for helping us all day on thursday trying to figure out why our robot wouldn't work(turned out to be a bad crio) and loan us a driver station for one match.

[Pete B]

Well, it was one great regional (my last as a student sadly). On behalf of 329 I would like to thank 527 for selecting us as an alliance partner and 353 for their outstanding performance. I really don't think that anyone was expecting the 22nd and 46th seeded teams to be such a threat, but we sure showed them! We're very happy to have made the finals and even though we lost, we're still happy with the results. With 287 being one of the champions, there's a good chance that they'll get re-sponsored, plus they get to go to nationals! So, congratulations to them and their partners, 496 and 2638, and a special congratulations to 353 for winning Chairman's. We're glad we had the opportunity to present you guys with the plaque. Great job everyone!

[Mark McLeod]

Here are links to media coverage of this year’s competition:

• Newsday.com - Robots Invade Long Island! | NBC New York*
• NBC-4 - High School Robotics Competition at Hofstra
• 880 WCBS-AM - http://podcast.wcbs880.com/wcbs/1655610.mp3

The competition was also covered by:

• News 12
• TV-55
• L.I. News Tonight
• CBS-2

as well as a number of local newspapers, so check these and local news editions.

Thanks to John Zaher of the Public Relations and Marketing Group for his efforts on behalf of SBPLI.

[colt527]

Originally Posted by Pete B

Well, it was one great regional (my last as a student sadly). On behalf of 329 I would like to thank 527 for selecting us as an alliance partner and 353 for their outstanding performance. I really don't think that anyone was expecting the 22nd and 46th seeded teams to be such a threat, but we sure showed them! We're very happy to have made the finals and even though we lost, we're still happy with the results. With 287 being one of the champions, there's a good chance that they'll get re-sponsored, plus they get to go to nationals! So, congratulations to them and their partners, 496 and 2638, and a special congratulations to 353 for winning Chairman's. We're glad we had the opportunity to present you guys with the plaque. Great job everyone!

It was absolutely our pleasure to pick you guys! I can't say thank you enough to teams 329 and 353!!! Your robots were amazing and your teams are so much fun to work with. We would have not gotten far without your awesome offensive abilities and strategies. I think the finals were made up of a lot of the underdogs from the competition, which just made them even more fun. You had the 4th, 5th, 16th, 22nd, 33rd and 46th teams in the finals. I think we all proved we can go against the big guys and win. Just shows the benefits of effective scouting.

I could not be more happy to lose to teams 287, 496 and 2638. They are all amazing! We had the pleasure to attend the Chesapeake Regional with team 287 and have nothing but the utmost respect for their great team!

On a sportively competitive note, it was nice to see the regional gold come back to Long Island We had so much fun playing with 2010 though, they are another amazing team and do nothing but good things for the Long Island regional. We hope to see you there again next year

[pschre]

Team 806 hadn't been to Long Island since 2005, but my whole team unanimously agreed after this weekend that we should come back much more often! I join many others in commending the field crew for facilitating 11 qualifying matches for everyone. The robot inspectors were pleasingly thorough, which made my kids feel more accountable for their work and glad that they followed the rules, and I even learned something new about the pneumatics layout from Pat Foley.

All weekend, my team greatly enjoyed the atmosphere in the pits and the friendliness of the "home teams." We didn't feel like outsiders or even in the minority even once. I also consider this our best performance in the 8 year history of our team. It made my weekend to see our driver as happy as he was when the judges removed the penalty in Quarterfinal 4-2 to force a 3rd match. When we went on to lose QF 4-3 by one point, I couldn't have been prouder of the smiles and gracious professionalism that my team maintained. Finally, thanks to 2161 and 270 for being great partners and easy to work with.

[TeAm270RoCkS]

Originally Posted by pschre

Team 806 hadn't been to Long Island since 2005, but my whole team unanimously agreed after this weekend that we should come back much more often! I join many others in commending the field crew for facilitating 11 qualifying matches for everyone. The robot inspectors were pleasingly thorough, which made my kids feel more accountable for their work and glad that they followed the rules, and I even learned something new about the pneumatics layout from Pat Foley.

All weekend, my team greatly enjoyed the atmosphere in the pits and the friendliness of the "home teams." We didn't feel like outsiders or even in the minority even once. I also consider this our best performance in the 8 year history of our team. It made my weekend to see our driver as happy as he was when the judges removed the penalty in Quarterfinal 4-2 to force a 3rd match. When we went on to lose QF 4-3 by one point, I couldn't have been prouder of the smiles and gracious professionalism that my team maintained. Finally, thanks to 2161 and 270 for being great partners and easy to work with.

This was by far the best Robotics Competition I have ever been to... the epic QF that my team had to play in was unbelievable and that one point loss was a thriller nonetheless. I have to thank teams 2161 and 806 for being great allies and I have to thank anyone that was there for making it so thrilling. I really can't wait till next year

[Mechanical]

It was one of the best run regionals this year but it was somewhat boring to watch. The game this year did not help with that. Thanks to 870 and 102 for picking us for the elimination matches. And thanks to everyone who helped us out during the event.

[Mark McLeod]

Here's a message from our Regional Director about SBPLI.
In addition to the stats Bill, our FTA, has provided below, I'd like to add that we didn't start a single match without all teams working with the field. Batteries were unplugged (or missing entirely in one case), robot radios were unplugged, robots were not turned on, Driver Stations failed (but never during a match), but the queuers and Bharat made sure everyone was plugged in and powered up before we allowed the match to go on. Everyone learned and got better and better as the matches went on.

Our match turnaround began to run so fast on Saturday that we had to actually slow down some of them to give the system time to post the scores.

The only team that missed matches was the one that burst into flames, and even they were back on the field playing by Saturday thanks to the hard work of inspectors and fellow teams.

I don't know how Brian C's voice heldup over three days of non-stop talking, but he provided the most excellent play-by-play and announcing I've heard at SBPLI!
(253/353, who's counting?)

-------------------------------

Hello Team Leaders -

I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for your help in expediting the match process at the SBPLI Long Island Regional. The stats below from our Field Technical Advisor, Bill Edelman, speak for themselves. If you see any of the technical and field re-set individuals, thank them also for the part they played.

a. to this point (with only 3 regionals remaining), SBPLI is the only regional to achieve 85 matches (the next closest were Philly & Conn, each played 80 total matches)

b. only 4 other regionals provided 11 matches per team (St Louis, Boilermaker, Hawaii, and Bayou - each with only 36, 35,33,31 competing teams respectively)

c. of the regionals with between 44 and 49 teams (there are 10 regionals that fit that criteria), only Israel managed to offer 10 matches per team, 4 others offered 9 per team, and the remaining 4 regionals offered 8 matches per team or less

d. 6 regionals had to play straight through lunch on Friday, and of those, only one (Israel) played more than 8 matches - this speaks to the efficiency of our scorers, refs, field reset staff, Mark, and above all the cooperation of teams themselves

It's teamwork in action - thanks for your help!

Janet

[Brian C]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

I don't know how Brian C's voice heldup over three days of non-stop talking, but he provided the most excellent play-by-play and announcing I've heard at SBPLI!
(253/353, who's counting?)

Thanks so much for the kind words. I feel honored to have already been asked back for next year's regional.

I'm SO glad the video director had the correct team number up on the screen coupled with the fact that there was NO team 253. I tried to make amends to team 353 as they returned to the stands while receiving their plaudits from the multitudes.

The Pobots (the REAL team 353) absolutely deserve their Regional Chairman's Award. I'll be pulling for them to be the first Long Island team to come back with the Championship Chairman's Award. That would be a very nice thing indeed.

[Mark McLeod]

In case you're interested...

The field problem you saw us working on Saturday morning was that one of the Blue stations wouldn't turn off it's eStop. In a matter of minutes we had systematically swapped everything out one at a time and tested each until we were left with the field control box. Unfortunately, the only spare field control box was already in use at the far end of the field. During field setup the Red field control box was not working correctly, so Mike had used the spare instead.

Luck was with us, because we'd tried to get in a few matches before Opening Ceremonies and discovered the problem early, so we just went to the ceremony while the field crew worked the issue.

We had to get that original Red field controller working, but because of the design of the Field Management System we couldn't just use it at the bad Blue end of the field. We swapped it in at the Red end of the field, troubleshot and resolved the original problem with it. Then we moved the freed up spare field control to the Blue end of the field and replaced the bad Blue field control.

We were ready to go right on time as Opening Ceremonies finished.
Someone will have to tell me how the ceremony went...

All in all, I saw no technical problems with the new Field Management System.
The Driver Stations and robot wireless would sometimes take a while to connect, especially at the Blue 2 station (slowing all the Friday matches), but that went away when we swapped out the Blue field control altogether Saturday morning.
A few design changes I'd personally make, however, I don't know that my changes wouldn't cause grief for reasons unknown to me.
We had maybe three or four false starts. One the Refs called because the orbit ball bins weren't where they were supposed to be, two others because the scorers had been correcting errors in past match scores (those were the two really fast matches- start trumpet, teleop sound, 20 seconds to go all at once), a couple of matches where a drive team accidentally disconnected their Driver Station or the plug fell out at the last second before the match started. The nice thing about the FMS this year is that it automatically cannot start a match if all teams aren't communicating. The FTA has to make a conscious choice to bypass a team, as in the case of 263 when they missed their matches while they were out getting repaired.

There were 8 or so team Driver Station failures for causes ranging from physically broken ethernet ports to failure to boot--with all the symptoms of electrostatic discharge (ESD). No one was happy with that, but we didn't let it affect a single match. We held up the matches when we had to to get every robot operational.
During the matches I saw one case of the cRIO resetting, probably due to ESD. Anti-static spray seemed to keep it from happening again. Cold Spring Harbor had a robot radio failure, but it came and went so it took me awhile to narrow down the cause by relocating the radio, then replacing the radio and cable altogether. A bunch of teams had batteries with bad cells that made their voltage drop precipitously, and many had wiring pull out.

In the pits we had 2487's cRIO failure, and various Jaguar failures were reported. Several robot radio wireless issues on Practice day were mostly due to incorrect SSID's and inadvertently pushing the Wireless Gaming Adaptor's special security button which changes the IP address (for some unknown design reason).